Warm forming of AA7075-T6: optimizing the heating time to maintain T6 condition

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Warm forming of AA7075-T6: optimizing the heating time to maintain T6 condition

LAURENT Hervé, ROYNE Sylvain, MAILLARD André

Abstract. Warm forming at 200°C is an interesting way of improving the formability of AA7075-T6. The T6 condition offers the highest ultimate and yield strengths of this aluminium alloy. It is therefore important to maintain these excellent mechanical properties at the end of the forming process. With the hot forming process at temperature above 450°C, it is necessary to add a heat recovery treatment obtained during paint baking to keep this T6 state, which is costly in terms of time and energy. In warm forming process, it is possible to maintain the T6 condition by controlling the heating time to avoid precipitation changes. The objective of this study is to find these optimal heating time conditions to maintain the T6 state during warm forming multi-step process. Different heating times were reproduced using a Gleeble 3500 machine. Electrical conductivity and hardness were measured after these different conditions to make the link with the evolutions of precipitates of AA7075-T6. Tensile tests were also performed to characterize the mechanical behavior at the end of these heating cycles. A holding time of less than 10 seconds is determined to maintain the T6 state at 200◦C. Two multi-step warm forming devices (a cylindrical cup in two steps and a U-channel part) were finally tested to validate these optimal time forming conditions.

Keywords
Warm Forming, AA7075-T6, Heating Time, Aging, Precipitation

Published online 4/24/2024, 7 pages
Copyright © 2024 by the author(s)
Published under license by Materials Research Forum LLC., Millersville PA, USA

Citation: LAURENT Hervé, ROYNE Sylvain, MAILLARD André, Warm forming of AA7075-T6: optimizing the heating time to maintain T6 condition, Materials Research Proceedings, Vol. 41, pp 1159-1165, 2024

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21741/9781644903131-128

The article was published as article 128 of the book Material Forming

Content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.

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